For those of you who have never used a computer outside of your own country: There exists more than one keyboard layout in the wide world. In fact, there are a whole bunch.

There are three common keyboard forms, ANSI [US] (for full sized keyboards, this used to be called "101 key", a few years ago Microsoft added their own keys though), ISO [Europe] ("102 key"), and JIS [Japan] ("106 key").

Then, for each form, there are any number of different layouts where labels are assigned to keys depending which characters are needed most in that country. For instance, on a US keyboard there are no accented characters; you use dead keys (option-u+u for an umlauted u, for example.) But the majority of European layouts have accented characters directly available as a single key. Punctuation is also shifted around. (There are other options for accented characters on Windows. The AltGr modifier key, or the incredibly inconvenient Alt+numpad sequence.)

All of the above assumes a layout derived from QWERTY. On top of that, there is the Dvorak keyboard and a whole set of international flavors.

Quote:Originally posted by applekid Check the new keyboards on the G5 and eMacs (and basically any new desktop Mac). It might be changed on that one. This new keyboard has an over-sized esc key. I *think* I might have seen the option-less alt key on that kind of keyboard.